Presently, healthcare enterprises generally are plagued by the lack of connectivity and interoperability between disparate hospital and radiology information systems (HIS/RIS) from a variety of vendors. Typical systems may employ a mix of incompatible network, Picture Archive and Communication Sysytem (PACS), and diagnostic image format standards, such as HL7, DICOM, IHE, and XML.
The lack of interoperability between existing information and imaging systems is one of the most critical problems facing the diagnostic and management effectiveness of the healthcare profession today. This fundamental problem not only diminishes the potential benefits of medical care capability, it also diminishes the financial bottom line of every healthcare facility. In addition, solving the interoperability problem is essential for eventual implementation of a standards based enterprise wide Electronic Health Record.
By using the IHE (integrating the Healthcare Enterprise) systems integration standards approach with cooperation from customers and vendors, effective and powerful systems integration solutions for the healthcare enterprise, such as the MEDxConnect products by Compressus, Inc., seamlessly integrate a wide variety of independent systems into a single network. For example, the MEDxConnect products use a technique of dealing with messages between disparate systems. This permits the MEDxConnect products to present messages to a vendor workstation or system in a compatible format. Each disparate system has some unique characteristics that are handled by the MEDxConnect System to make the transfer of data transparent.
However, once in place, integrated networks are only as efficient as their weakest link. Many times in a healthcare enterprise there is a bottleneck in communications. Some facilities within the enterprise are overloaded while others are not operated at capacity. In other instances, resources in the form of equipment are not efficiently deployed. Certain geographic locations may have the need for additional resources over other locations. Still in other instances, resources in the form of personnel are not efficiently deployed or working at optimal levels. In most instances, such specific inefficiencies would go largely undetected in a healthcare enterprise because the only way to detect or identify these inefficiencies is to have an administrator review possibly hundreds of tables in logs to find the problem. This is often so time consuming that it can't be done. Consequently, a system is needed which quickly identifies or detects inefficiencies or bottlenecks in the workflow, alerts the administrator to the problem and provides remedies to the problem.